Can we talk?

At a time of religious friction when many religious scholars are seeking to reconcile the beliefs and ultimate truth claims of world faiths, Stanley Hauerwas, whom Time magazine once called the best theologian in America, came to Boston College to say that he “could not be a representative of the ‘we’ that thinks such a task is necessary.”

A self-identified Methodist who recently began attending a pacifist-leaning Episcopal congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, near where he teaches at Duke University’s divinity school, Hauerwas gave the annual Candlemas Lecture, part of the Lowell Humanities Series, on February 2. Though known for his earthy language as well as for propounding what he calls a “robust” (read, first-century-like) Christianity, the bricklayer’s son with a high Texas twang did not let off any four-letter words that night, aside from rhetorical uses of “hell.” But characteristically, the 65-year-old professor did say things that would surely offend sensibilities across the political-theological spectrum.

He titled his lecture “The End of Pluralism: A Tribute to David Burrell, CSC,” referring to the priest who chaired the University of Notre Dame’s theology department when Hauerwas taught there from 1970 to 1984; who wrote Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (1993); and who, according to Hauerwas, doesn’t fudge his Christian faith in close encounters with other religions.

Hauerwas distanced himself from liberal multicultural fashion, lodging objections to the notions held in Western democracies that religious faith can be kept separated from the public arena; and especially that one faith is as good as another, that Christians, Buddhists, Rastafarians, and all other believers have equal claims on religious truth. He also carved out a wide space between himself and Christian adherents on the religious right who, he believes, use the Bible to justify such nation-state habits as war-making. Violence always and everywhere belies faith in the Prince of Peace, as he reads the Scriptures.

Riling himself on that point and ratcheting up the irony, the Methodist rapped his pulpit and declaimed—”The American people have become so corrupt that the only thing to do is to take the Bible away from them.”

A Catholic wag might interject that this is what the Roman Church has been saying all along, ever since the Gutenberg press started cranking out Bibles for everyone in the 1450s. And in fact Hauerwas was taking aim at what he styles “Protestant heresy,” the notion that Christians can read the Scriptural text without interpretive guidance from Christian tradition and the community of the faithful—”a truncated, if not idolatrous form of Christianity,” he called it. By his rendering, this Protestant doctrine, sola Scriptura, has aided in the modern ascendance of exaggerated individualism and the secular nation-state. “It is important to remember,” he said, drawing a provocative link between Christian fundamentalism and modern liberal individualism, that “the Protestant Right is as much the creature of Enlightenment developments as is Protestant liberalism.” But drawing on writings of the late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas cast blame all the way back to the Roman Emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity in 312, thus merging cross and shield. That was a fateful blow that put “robust” Christianity on its downward slope, in his view, toward a bland amalgam of Christ and culture.

Hauerwas recalled that some years ago he gave a talk at Hendrix College, in Conway, Arkansas, where he faced a religion professor who complained that the Hauerwasian insistence on the centrality of Christian convictions would render dialogue with Buddhists impossible. During that exchange, Hauerwas’s first rejoinder was to inquire into how many Buddhists there were in Conway, Arkansas. He recalled telling the professor that if he wanted to talk with any of them, “You might begin by asking, ‘What the hell are you guys doing in Conway?'” Hauerwas has long argued that a chief task of Christians is to build up Christian community, not the broader culture (“I’m not trying to make America work. I’m trying to make the Church work,” he remarked on another occasion), and he indirectly made this point by adding that the “real challenge in Conway was not talking with Buddhists, but trying to talk with Christian fundamentalists.”

Still, Hauerwas insists that he does want Christians to engage with believers of other faiths, although he argues that “the way forward [in interfaith discourse] must be fragmentary and occasional,” and he is skeptical of a purely academic approach (“scholarship can never replace the concrete encounter with the neighbor who is different from me”). So how, asked Hauerwas, do we “theorize relations” among Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, and Muslims without asking one another to “pocket” or compartmentalize our particular faiths and embrace a kind of McPluralism (as the theologian Kenneth Surin might put it) that avoids differences?

He proposed two requirements of Christian discourse with other faiths: the obligation that Christians “be heralds” for Jesus and the obligation that as heralds they “renounce coercion,” past and present, in the name of their faith. According to Hauerwas, Christians must say to others, “‘The picture you’ve been given of Jesus by empire, by the Crusades, by the struggle over the holy sites, and by wars in the name of the Christian West is not something to forget but something to be forgiven.’ . . . All we have to contribute to interfaith dialogue is our capacity to get out of the way so that beyond our ancestors, our language systems, our strengths and weaknesses, the people we converse with might see Jesus.”

Hauerwas said that he often asks large gatherings of divinity students at Duke if they’ve ever invited someone to be a Christian, and that he never sees more than two raised hands. “What are they doing? Aren’t they happy?” he asked rhetorically. This remark evoked scattered, almost nervous laughter, as if the lecture goers thought he’d turn the same question on them and reap about as many raised hands as he does at Duke. Instead, he told of Fr. Burrell.

As chairman of Notre Dame’s theology department, Burrell received funding to set up a chair in Judaica, but Hauerwas said the priest resisted the temptation “to make Judaism an exotic other” or to make the Jewish faith appear as a mere antecedent to Christianity, and so Burrell incorporated the Judaica chair into the curriculum “in a manner that made clear the work done by our colleague in Judaica was crucial for Christian theology.” After stepping down as department chair, Burrell, who still teaches theology at Notre Dame, went on an interfaith adventure: living in Jerusalem, where he immersed himself in the lives of Jews and Palestinians, celebrating Mass in Hebrew, learning Arabic (through Hebrew), and translating Islamic texts into English. He authored several important commentaries and books, among them Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (1986). For Hauerwas, a telling tribute to Burrell is that after he left the Middle East, Iranian mullahs invited him back to talk about prayer, Christian prayer, not about pluralism or interfaith dialogue as such.

“That David Burrell has been drawn into the lives of Jews and Muslims is not because he is a cosmopolitan. Rather, he has been drawn into the lives of Jews and Muslims because he is a Catholic,” said Hauerwas, whose best-known work, A Community of Character (1981), appears on Christianity Today‘s list of the 20th century’s 100 most important religious books.

Hauerwas did not connect all the dots between Burrell and the purported “end of pluralism,” although he suggested that a decline in their worldly power has freed Christians to be Christian, and so to talk about Jesus, about praying to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, without seeming threatening to other believers.

“As a Christian I have no theory or policy to solve the problem of the new religious pluralism,” he confessed at the end of his lecture. “But I do have something to give. I give you the example of David Burrell.”

William Bole’s articles on religious topics have appeared in the Washington Post, Commonweal, and other outlets.